Governor-General

This aims at spreading the GG’s net further than the usual round of Rotary clubs and the like.

Recently, for instance, they held a ceremony for foster parents. ‘‘We had people here who had been foster parents for over 40 years and had fostered 400 children,’’ she says. ‘‘At one point the guest speaker said, ‘Hands up if this is the first time you’ve been to Government House.’ And almost the whole room did – and she did as well.’’

Reddy’s days of wheeling and dealing have also left an awkward blip on her CV: a scolding from a senior judge.

Like many other baby boomers, nowadays she is a champion of the Treaty, but she grew up an ignorant Pakeha.

‘‘In 1964 there was the big centennial for Hamilton, and I remember thinking ‘Oh, there must not have been anything here before that. That was the beginning of Hamilton.’

‘‘I’ve thought about that a lot since, and how appalling it was.’’

Nowadays most Hamiltonians know about colonial invasion and land confiscation, but few did back then.

On the other hand, Reddy got an early glimpse of the other side of New Zealand. When she was very young her schoolteacher parents taught at Minginui, a tiny dirt-poor Maori settlement in the Bay of Plenty.

‘‘Even when we got to Hamilton I remember my mother saying she wanted to learn Maori, and I was aghast. Where would you speak it? I was learning French at school and I thought that was much more useful…

‘‘So I kind of had this parental guidance that there was something different. I remember my father, who was really interested in history, telling me about the Battle of Gate Pa, which I never learned about at school.’’

The nation’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi, was signed ‘‘between the Crown, at that stage Queen Victoria, and Maori. And I’m the representative now of that relationship,’’ she says proudly. ‘‘So that’s sort of unique – we’re probably the only country in the world that has that basis.’’

Another great strength of the constitutional monarchy, she says, ‘‘is that you have someone who is head of state who is not the government. And I look around the world at the moment and I think maybe that’s no bad thing. You have that continuity of government that is avowedly apolitical.’’

But isn’t the idea that the Queen is the Treaty partner just a fiction? The government is the real partner, and couldn’t a president do everything the governorgeneral now does?

Yes, she says, the government has always been the one that could give effect to the Treaty ‘‘or breach it’’. But ‘‘if you go to marae all around the country you will see a picture of the Queen, so there is still that connection [which] the Maori still hold to be important’’.

Of course a president could replace the GG ‘‘and New Zealanders will make that decision in due course but at the moment I feel very comfortable with the constitutional monarchy, and I think it serves our current New Zealand well’’.

Isn’t it kind of odd that the head of state of our proudly independent state is the Queen of England?

‘‘I guess the fact that we’ve been able to do that regardless shows that [having a Queen] is not an impediment to being an independent, free and democratic state.’’

Reddy left Hamilton at 17 and leaped from mountaintop to mountaintop. She earned a masters in Law and became a law lecturer at Victoria before quickly becoming a partner in a major law firm. One of her students at Vic was Chris Finlayson, who as Minister for Treaty Negotiations hired her as a Treaty Crown negotiator.

She worked for Brierley Investments for 11 years and has held a wide range of senior jobs in government and business. But she has had her critics.

The Greens said they were ‘‘surprised’’ that Reddy was appointed governor-general so soon after she finished her ‘‘controversial’’ review of spy agencies with former Labour deputy prime minister Sir Michael Cullen. They also said the review granted great new powers to the spies while doing little to make them more accountable.

Weren’t the Greens really suggesting that she was just a government stooge?

‘‘I totally refute that,’’ says Reddy. ‘‘We met with a range of people, we got a lot of submissions, we came to our independent view. We weren’t influenced by the Government in that at all.’’

And anyway, the then prime minister, John Key, asked her about becoming GG before she and Cullen submitted their report, ‘‘so at that stage he had no idea what it said’’.

Did she and Cullen say no to anything that the security services asked for? ‘‘Oh yes, absolutely.’’ They had tried to produce a ‘‘fair and balanced report’’.

In 2003 then High Court judge Justice William Young criticised her behaviour as a director of Active Equities, an investment company she set up with other former employees of Brierley Investments.

AE was involved in a tangled deal involving meat company giants PPCS and Richmond. The details are complex, but Reddy’s part concerned her denial that PPCS had guaranteed a loan to an AE subsidiary buying Richmond shares. Rather, she said, it was an indemnity. This mattered because AE made a $20m profit after selling the shares later.

‘‘I think that the indemnity was, in fact, a guarantee and that her denial of the existence of a guarantee was wrong,’’ Justice Young said in 2003. ‘‘I accept that she believed that what she was saying was strictly speaking correct. It was nonetheless misleading ...’’ It had also contributed to the suspicions surrounding AE’s role, he said. What does she say now? ‘‘I answered strictly correctly. There was no guarantee, and that was found by the judge ... I feel confident that the way I operated or the things I did were strictly legal.’’

But the judge’s critique was an ethical one – so did she act ethically as well as legally? Reddy pauses and says: ‘‘Yes.’’ Here is a slight catch in the usual flow, but not for long. It’s the job of the governorgeneral, after all, to emphasise the positive, and Patsy Reddy is an expert at that.